“Well, Marcelo and when the book?”the Uruguayan Isabel Machado, editor of the Round Stone Editions, asked Marcelo Aldunate, as soon as he got out of the stage. It was the first night of the Bunkers at the national Stadium, in April 2024, and the music producer and former Radio Rock & Pop director, had been invited to liven up the wait with a DJ set loaded to the sentence rock. “And with the enthusiasm I had, I said, ‘already, if you obviously,” he recalls himself, on the other side of the screen Worship.
Aldunate was summoned to write in the Rayado Disco Collection, of the same publishing housein which an author freely develops a text from a key album of Chilean popular music. Therefore, when Machado was called that cold April night, the man did not hesitate: His would be a book about the first homonymous disc of the bunkers. The same that includes themes that became inescapable in the band’s catalog, such as I sowed my love sorrows in your garden, Among my arms y The detainee.
“It was a contrast for the moment she raised it to me Aldunate explains. You see the group in the national stadium full, but the history of the bunkers starts in a very different way. Then it seemed to me that it was interesting to tell what was happening with them, their arrival in Santiago, which translates into the album, what happened to me, etc. ”
That was the origin of the title that will be available since Monday 5 in bookstores and stores in the field. In its 144 pages, Aldunate reviews the first years of the group from their point of view. Since the first time he saw them, in the legendary toucha in the Tomm Pub, to the invitation, for emergency, to the rare new touches, of the R&P, thanks to the fact that he had obtained the number of Álvaro López and scored it in a napkin. One of those tasty stories that enter the rock and roll memorabilia.
“The number is passed by Álvaro in a super rare instanceleaving the bathroom after having a very strange encounter with a guy who faced it. They are such situations where things happen, ”says the author.
Writing the book was a challenge for Aldunate. Most of his career has passed between radio announcers and recording studies, so he had not had more experience with the pen. For him, that was not a problem. “I am getting into such a name, but in all the things I have done, it has also been in the same way. I got to produce albums without being a musician and without being a sound engineer. It is a way of approaching the things that has accompanied me all my life. ”
Aldunate sat down to write after the band’s shows at the Ñuñoa Coliseum, and took about eight months of work. “It was hard for me to start, find a way that made me feel comfortable, but then I found a thread. He dedicated a time, three times a week, particularly Saturdays. I also had to talk with many people who were in some of those moments, because well, memory sometimes betrays. ”
In its pages, the book not only addresses what bunkers lived in those heroic years when they bid for a place. Also recreates the time and even details that, despite Aldunate’s disposition for rotating the song on radios The detaineewithout being an official single, he had to face executive resistance.
“I feel that the independent song of its attributes is very melodic, very remembered. That makes it a great song. Probably, That resistance that could have had to do with what was playing at the time. It was a natural resistance to music that is different. I played it because I liked the song, it seemed to me that I contributed, ”he says.
By the way, one of the axes of the book is the recording of the album in July 2000, in the Konstantinople studies, with Carlos Cabezas and Mauricio Melo in the musical production and their reading more than twenty years. “It seems to me that it is an album that, above all, represents very well what bunkers were at that time. There are some songs that continue to like me, they continue to cause me the same thing that caused me when I heard it for the first time. There are bunkers albums that I probably like this, in its entirety, but it seems to me that it has aged very well. ”
The book also adds jumps to the present time. For example, Aldunate’s link co -producing four album songs November and his participation to specify a key moment of the shows in the National Stadium: the appearance of Víctor Jara on video, to add it when the group played its version of The right to live in peace.
“We had to intervene a lot, it was laborious, the truth -Apunta- However, the tools that exist today allow you not to work on that, but dedicate a couple of days and go tuning details. But when we realized that it could be achieved, we already knew what we had to do. ”
The book Los Bunkersby Marcelo Aldunate, will be presented at an event to be announced. Meanwhile, it will be available in presale on the search portal until Tuesday, May 6 and from May 9 it will be sold during the band’s acoustic tour shows. Precisely, this week it was announced that the group will add a show at the Movistar Arena, on November 8. Tickets will go on sale in exclusive presale for clients Banco Estado, from May 6 to 8, and in general sale on the 9th of the same month.
